On October 6, President Biden said that for the “first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they’ve been going.... And, you know, we’re trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off-ramp?” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/10/06/remarks-by-president-biden-at-democratic-senatorial-campaign-committee-reception/)
Ray McGovern writes today in Antiwar.com that Biden is correct in harkening back to the crisis 60 years ago, but he is wrong in thinking that Putin has an off ramp.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet ship had brought what we now know to be an explosive potential equivalent to over 45,500 kilotons of TNT—more than 20 times the explosive power of the ordnance dropped by Allied bombers on Germany during all of World War II.
The medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba would have been able to strike Washington, D.C. or the Strategic Air Command Headquarters in Omaha, within only minutes.
This was an existential risk to the United States, and Kennedy was able to prevail upon Khrushchev to remove the missiles, in exchange for U.S. promises never to invade Cuba and to remove missiles from Turkey.
The Soviet leader explained his thinking: “When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of 500 million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness.
“So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs’ ... and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians….
